by Patrick Mann
“No I won’t.”
“You’ll adore me, baby.”
“You’re fine just the way you are.”
“Uh-uh. No way. Like this it’s unreal, love.”
“Not to me,” Littlejoe insisted doggedly. “I like you this way. I don’t like you with parts missing.”
“But a new part put in.”
“That’s bullshit,” Joe corrected her. “I talked to guys who know. They say it’s a lousy substitute. I know what the real thing is, remember. Even on Tina. What they’ll cut for you is no way like the real thing, no muscles, no juices to make it nice and slick, no nerve endings. You won’t feel. It’ll be like I’m fucking somebody else.”
“And you,” she snapped waspishly, “won’t have this all-day sucker, will you?” She sneered at him, her nostrils widening fearsomely. “It’s everything for you, isn’t it, bitch? You want that fat slut out in Queens at your beck and call. Roll over, have kids, drop dead, on command like an insane doggie. And you want me to take any way it strikes you, upside down, up the rear, in the mouth. It’s, like, unreal, a circus act. They warned me about you,” she added darkly.
Neither of them spoke for a long moment. “What’s that?”
“You heard me,” Lana retorted. “They warned me you were no good. A real waster. They warned me you’d fuck anything that’d stand still for it. Oh, baby, were they right or were they right.”
“Who warned you?”
“Ev-ry-body,” Lana drawled scornfully. “Ab-so-lutely every mother on the street told me what an insane cunt you were, not even a proper gay, AC-DC, swings any way he can get it with anything that he can tie down and ram it into. What you are, you’re a nymphomaniac.”
Joe laughed softly. “Is that what I am, huh?”
“You got, like, an unreal itch,” Lana told him. “Sometimes I can’t believe what you do. Other times, of course, it’s so easy to figure.”
“No kidding.”
“So easy,” she taunted him. “You’re an open book with that baby tool of yours. Talk about Tiny Alice. I had a thirteen-year-old once that had three times as much as you, and he didn’t stop growing for another five years.”
“Cradle-snatching, huh?”
“People say to me, ‘Lana,’ they say, ‘it’s, like, unreal how that Littlejoe carries on,’ they say, and I say, ‘You wouldn’t believe what I know about him,’ and they say, ‘Like what?’ and I say nothing. I protect your insane reputation. Don’t ask me why.”
“Because you love me, that’s why.”
“Love? With that kind of love, who needs suicide? You’ll murder me with love.” She had started to cry again. “You won’t even pay for the one thing I need to become a real person.”
“Maybe I will.”
The tears stopped. “Yes? When?”
“One of these days.”
“The same promises.” Lana shook her head, and the long flaxen wig slid uneasily over one eyebrow. “I don’t know why I believe them, why I keep sticking with you, why I protect your good name, even now. Let the whole world know what kind of unreal creep you are, why should I care? I got everything about you figured out, and there isn’t even one good reason to keep it to myself.”
“What’s my secret?”
“Never mind. We both know what it is.”
“No, tell me,” he coaxed.
“I’ve said it before. It’s not exactly the hottest news in town.” She rolled on her back and stared at the ceiling. Passing cars in the street below set up strange shiftings of light and shadow with their moving headlamps. “It’s that insane minicock of yours. Anybody who calls you Littlejoe has probably heard how small it is. He’s probably even seen it, the way you flaunt that tiny thing.”
“I never heard anybody complain about it,” Joe said.
“It’s because you’re so touchy. Nobody wants to run afoul of you. You’re small, but everybody knows you’re, like, insane strong.”
“You better believe it.”
“Then if you’re really strong,” she said, “be a man. Get me what I need. Don’t think of it as a favor to me. Think of it as an investment. I’ll keep repaying you for the rest of my life.”
“You will?”
Lana lay without speaking for a moment. Littlejoe decided she’d gone too far, promised too much. Part of Lana’s charm was her selfishness. It turned him on. “You really want the operation that bad?”
“I want it,” she responded in a low, dramatic voice, “more than life itself. If I don’t get it soon, I’m doing away with myself.”
“Don’t put me on, baby.”
“I’ll kill myself. And you’ll be responsible.”
“That,” he said, “I’ve heard before.”
“You won’t hear it again. The next you’ll hear is from the coroner.”
Littlejoe watched the patterns of light on the ceiling. Somewhere in the distance somebody was strumming a guitar, probably sitting on the front stoop of one of the brownstone tenements. Whoever was playing the guitar wasn’t very good, but he kept at it, slamming into one chord after another as if he knew what he was doing. The jangling began to irritate Joe.
“What if I told you,” he said then, drawing out his words in the same tantalizing way Lana had, “that very soon I’ll have enough money to buy you a thousand operations.”
“What would I say? Bullshit is what I would say.”
“I’m not kidding.”
“I’ve heard that before,” Lana mocked him.
“You won’t hear it again,” he said, mimicking her ultimatum. “The next you’ll hear is what you read in the newspapers or see on TV.”
“That boring bank job again. Like, unreal.”
“You won’t find the bread boring.”
“You’re still into that whole fantasy schtick?” Lana said.
“It’s no fantasy.”
“If I wait for you to pay my operation from a bank job,” Lana told him, “I’ll have a long gray beard and my tits will be swinging around my goddamned navel.”
Littlejoe sat up on the mattress. He was covered with a coarse dew of perspiration, but whether it was from the heat or from thinking about robbing a bank, he had no idea. “I told you. I said I wasn’t kidding. And when I say something, it’s so.”
“Dream on.”
“You’ll see.”
“Shit I’ll see. And I’m already looking at it.” She turned to stare provocatively at him, her eyes imbedded in soggy swamps of mascara.
Joe got to his feet, anxious to be on the move, to get himself out of range of such talk and move his plans along. There was a pad where Sam and a few other kids crashed at night. This thing was moving along faster than he himself knew.
“Where you running away to?”
“Business.”
She watched him dress and move to the door. “You’re just leaving me dumped here? I don’t have a crying dime to my name, you insane bitch.”
“Here.” He reached in his pocket and threw a bill at her, not sure what denomination it was. He opened the door. A wave of piss smell wafted in from the hall, laced with the oily stench of roach killer. “I’ll be moving around the Village a few hours. Clean up your face and I’ll see you at one of the bars around maybe two or three.” He slammed the door behind him and clattered down the stairs on his clog heels.
Outside the street was cooler, but not by much. Across the way a young man, wearing only overalls, was tapping his bare foot as he attacked the guitar strings with amateur zeal.
Littlejoe frowned. He remembered what the closet queen Don had said earlier about amateurs. This bank thing couldn’t be anything but a professional job. Nothing connected with Littlejoe could be amateurish. He was too much of a name in his own right to do anything but a total pro job.
He set out to find Sam.
6
The pad was somewhere on Barrow or Morton Street, on the far west side of Greenwich Village. Littlejoe had been there once before—or, rather, he had been str
olling past the place when someone mentioned that it was where Sam crashed with a few of his friends.
Most of them, like Sam, were barely out of their teens, if that. They had a sort of den mother, a middle-aged writer type who had left his wife and given up the straight life for what he was doing now: taking care of the group, clearing out rats and roaches, making sure there was always a hot mug of soup for the boys, or hash if they smoked, or Band-Aids if they bled. Hard drugs were out, but almost anything else was in, Joe had been told.
Naturally, in order to live, in order to bring home a gallon of cheap California red or a carton of butts now and then, they had to work the trucks, like Sam, or else steal.
From things Sam had said, Joe gathered that all of them had homes they might once have gone back to, but not any more. They’d rather scuffle and steal than take from their parents, many of whom had long ago given up trying to get them back, or even trying to find out where they were. After the age of eighteen it became a lot easier, Sam had told him, to kiss off your home. Now all of them had their own home, loose-knit but happy enough. And the older man who looked after them didn’t require any special kind of servicing. He wasn’t into that scene, Sam had reported, trading shelter for sex. “Some kinda do-gooder,” Sam had put it, “but gay.”
Littlejoe had always found it peculiar that Sam never thought of himself as gay, even though the rest of the boys, and their den mother, were. Sam was into the gay scene almost exclusively, but if he was asked, as occasionally happened, he would always claim he wasn’t really gay, just “sort of trying things out.” It made for a special bond between Sam and Joe, who did not think of himself as gay either.
Striding along the dark stretches of lower Seventh Avenue, Littlejoe turned in at Barrow and followed its forty-five-degree turn as it led west toward the river. There were three of these strangely kinked streets here, one next to the other, Morton below Barrow and St. Luke’s below Morton.
Joe felt sure the pad wasn’t on St. Luke’s, which was a rather fancy segment of Leroy Street that had changed its name for just that block. The houses were one-family ones, some still with the original gas-lamps outside the front doors. One was where some ex-mayor of the city had shacked up with his girlfriend. Another was supposed to have a ghost. It wasn’t the block for a gay crash pad.
He found it, finally, on Morton, between the bend in the street and the corner of Bedford, a basement apartment with windows that barely looked out at shoe-leather level to the sidewalk. There were no lights inside, but Littlejoe felt pretty sure he’d find someone to let him in. He descended the stairs and rapped on the steel door. It boomed like a drum.
After a moment it opened several inches, to show a sturdy steel-link chain holding it from opening any farther. The older man peered out at him. “It’s one A.M., man,” he said. “Go home.”
“It’s Littlejoe. I’m a pal of Sam’s.”
The single eye watching him shifted sideways in its socket, then stared back at him. “Sam’s asleep. Come back tomorrow, man.”
“Shit he’s sleeping. I gotta talk to him.”
“About what?”
“You his pimp?” Littlejoe asked.
“About what?”
“Business. A chance to make himself a buck.”
“Stealing what?” the man snapped back.
“You’re not his pimp, you must be his mother,” Joe retorted. “Let the guy answer for himself. Let me talk to him.”
The older man paused for a moment. The one eye blinked twice. “You can’t talk to him in here. We got people trying to sleep.”
“I’ll buy him a drink at some bar.”
“When will you get him back?”
“What the hell is this?” Joe exploded. “He’s over eighteen, for Christ’s sake.”
“That’s not it. We get ripped off here regular, like a lot of basement places. I lock up for good right about now. Anybody comes back after I lock up, he can’t get in till morning.”
“I get it, you’re not his mother, you’re his warden.”
“From that smart mouth on you,” the man said, “you really must be Littlejoe.”
“A legend in his own time. That’s me.”
“You’re a legend, all right,” the man agreed. “Sam told me you helped him out of a tight squeeze earlier tonight. So, I guess . . .” His voice died away as he left the door.
Joe stood in the downstairs areaway and waited. No traffic could be heard on Morton or even nearby Bedford or Seventh Avenue. This time of night, nobody cruised these Village streets, not even cops. This was the so-called quiet quarter of the area, officially labeled a historical landmark section. With no clubs or theaters nearby, the area had few late-night strollers.
The steel door closed, then opened wide enough for Sam to slip out, buttoning a denim jacket over his bare chest, even though the night was still quite hot. His eyes looked wary, and his face, as always, was as grave as if carved from stone. Sometimes he reminded Littlejoe of a painted angel, but tonight he looked more like one of those thingies on the roofs of churches that the water spouts through, better-looking than most but still kind of grim.
“What gives, Littlejoe?”
“Got a business proposition.”
Sam’s head was already shaking from side to side as the words left Joe’s mouth. Behind him, standing in the doorway, the older, den-mother type watched both men carefully, as if they were speaking a code he was trying to crack.
“Don’t say no till you hear it.”
“I don’t have to hear it, Littlejoe.”
His big black eyes looked pleadingly at Joe. The den mother moved up behind Sam. “You don’t have to discuss it tonight, Sam,” he said. “It’ll last till tomorrow. Or even till never.”
“Tonight,” Joe insisted. “Now. Come on, I’ll take you over to Chumley’s for a beer.”
He had mentioned the only bar in the neighborhood, no more than a block away, a fairly respectable restaurant and drinking place that had once been a Prohibition-era speakeasy and still did its best to preserve a slightly illegal atmosphere. But Sam knew it was basically square and straight, not a leather joint he was liable to have trouble in. The thoughts chased themselves over his stolid, deadpan face and Littlejoe could almost read them as they went back and forth. He realized he had made a good choice in Chumley’s. Sam would consider it safe and nearby, a place from which he could leave without being molested, a place where he could tell Joe no and get away with it.
“Just a half-hour. One beer,” Sam was saying.
Littlejoe jerked his thumb at the older man. “Clear it with the warden, Sammy. Otherwise he’ll come looking for you.”
“That mouth,” the man said. “That great big mouth.”
“It’s okay,” Sam told him. He took Joe’s arm and almost hustled him up the steps and along Morton Street. “He don’t mean nothing,” Sam said once he was out of earshot of the den mother. “He’s a good guy. Without him, we’d be long gone. But he, like, fusses. You know?”
“Fusses. I know.”
They were heading up Bedford. Now they turned east again and found an arched entryway in a brick wall. The archway led into a kind of flagstone courtyard filled with bagged garbage and empty corrugated boxes in which bottled beer had been shipped. Ahead was another arched door, almost hidden in darkness. Its wood was so thick that no sound came through it, but when Littlejoe pushed it open a blast of jukebox music hit him in the face.
The bar wasn’t terribly long, but it stood at one end of a square taproom area crowded with standees nursing beers and other drinks. Beyond their chatter and the jukebox thump lay a dining room, which was nearly empty at this hour. Littlejoe planted Sam in a corner against the wall and bought two draft beers in mugs, which he tried to keep from spilling as he picked his way through the crowd back to Sam.
A woman stood talking to him, a woman perhaps twice his age, dressed in a body shirt and faded Levis, her aviator spectacles tinted the lightest shade of brown. Sh
e turned to Littlejoe as he arrived with the beers.
“Doesn’t he talk?”
Joe shrugged. “It’s kind of late for him to be out.”
“You his brother?”
“Buddy.”
“Doesn’t he dig girls?”
Joe handed both mugs of beer to Sam. He turned back to the woman, who was half a head taller than he. He eyed her full breasts and narrow waist. “No,” he said, “but I do.” He reached for her with both hands, fingers outstretched, as if tuning two dials of a large radio. She blinked and backed out of range.
“What kind of thing is that to do?”
“Your pad around here?” Joe persisted. “Let’s go there now. By the time Sam finishes both beers, you’ll be halfway to heaven, baby.”
She took another step back. “Who said you could come on that way?”
“Or would you like both of us?” Joe continued. “We do a great front-and-back act, baby. It’s ten bucks apiece.”
A look of disgust crossed her face. She turned away and lost herself in the crowd. Littlejoe retrieved one of the beers from Sam. “Now, about this proposition. You remember a closet type name of Don?”
Sam shook his head from side to side. He sipped the beer and left a faint white moustache of foam on his upper lip, like a boy drinking milk. “Chubby bastard with a nervous giggle?” Joe went on. “Works for Chase Bank. He—” He stopped and tapped Sam’s narrow chest for emphasis. “He is our meal ticket to thousands and thousands in cash, Sammy.”
Sam’s eyes hooded slightly, as if in pain, but he said nothing. “He is the guy who will hip us to a real heist,” Littlejoe continued. He felt that Sam wasn’t really listening, that he had somehow tuned out the words. He poked Sam’s chest again, gently, three times. You didn’t want to come on rough with Sam, because that only made him pull back deeper in his shell.
The jukebox was slamming so hard that if the room hadn’t been filled with warm, sweaty bodies blocking the huge speakers, the noise would have been painful. As it was, Joe could half shout in Sam’s ear and know for certain that he wasn’t being overheard.
